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Daily Circuit Blog
Stephanie Curtis

What’s on your vacation reading list?

Go Deeper.

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I leave for my two-week summer vacation soon. Last year, I nailed my holiday reading pile. This is what I brought:

'Act One' by Moss Hart

'The Possessed' by Elif Batuman

'Go With M' by Castle Freeman

Here's what makes a good vacation book pile for me:

1) Nothing overly ambitious.* I hate to haul a book across the country and either never actually pick it up or have a book so lengthy that it takes over my vacation.

2) The books should be dissimilar. I like to have range. Three mysteries novels would bore me. Last year's list included a wry memoir of making it on Broadway, a collection of funny essays about literary criticism and graduate studies,** and a backwoods noir novella.

3) At least one has to be something that my boyfriend would be willing to read. I like to be able to share books.

What do you look for in a vacation read and what are you reading this summer?

*I don't mean it needs to be chick lit. Just that it needs to be for my entertainment and not for betterment. Also under 500 pages. It can't be the book equivalent of that four-hour Romanian movie about goat herding in my Netflix queue: the one that when it shows up in my house, I never get around to watching it.

**I swear 'The Possessed' really is funny.

--Stephanie Curtis, social media host